Miles to Go Before I Sleep Jackie Nink Pflug, with Peter J. Kisilos, Hazelden Publishing (page 5 of 11) Page 5 of 11

Every few seconds, he’d stop shaving and let me take a breath. Then he’d announce, “Okay, I’m going back over it again.”

My muscles tightened as I braced myself for more pain.

After the young man finished, another medical aide came in to finish the job with a smaller razor. He also gave me some shots to calm me down and reduce my pain.

A serious man with glasses who looked like a doctor walked over to my bedside. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I’m Dr. Lawrence Zrinzo. You’re going to be all right. We just need you to sign something.”

“What?”

“It’s a release giving your consent to the operation, relieving the hospital of liability.”

I felt dazed and out of it, but the humor of the situation didn’t escape me. “Here I am with a bullet in my head and you want me to sign something?” I laughed.

He nodded.

“Well, I can’t see well,” I informed him.

“That’s okay. We’ll just hold it for you.”

The doctor put a pen in my hand, and I asked him to steer my hand to the spot where he wanted me to sign. My pen contacted the hard surface of a clipboard and I moved it in broad strokes through the air, like I used to write my name with sparklers on the Fourth of July.

I could only see pieces of the doctor’s face, but I felt his reassuring hand on my shoulder. I sensed his positive energy and could tell he was a very sweet, caring man.

I had lost some blood, Dr. Zrinzo reported, but not enough to require a transfusion. He assured me that I was going to be okay. In a few minutes, I started feeling the effects of the anesthesia I’d been given.

The doctor and nurse walked on opposite sides of my bed as they wheeled me into surgery.

“And to think, we just got our equipment last week!” the nurse said, laughing.

What does she mean by that? I wondered, just before passing out.

The doctors at St. Luke’s didn’t know my medical history. They didn’t know that I had a rare allergic reaction to succinylcholine chloride — a muscle relaxant commonly used along with surgical anesthesia. When I had my appendix out as a little girl, the doctors had given me succinylcholine and I had stopped breathing. If they gave it to me again, I could die.

My mom knew my medical history. When she heard that I’d been shot, she immediately thought about the danger of an allergic reaction. She asked my sister Mary to call Pasadena Bayshore Medical Center and tell them to forward my medical records to Malta.

Thanks to Mom and Mary, doctors in Malta used the right anesthesia.

* * *

On Monday morning, November 25, Scott was still in Athens waiting to fly to Malta. Embassy officials were in constant contact with ground observers and officials inMalta who would be able to report exactly when Egypt’s crack team of “Thunderbolt” commandos stormed the plane.

At about 8 P.M. Sunday night, the commandos were ordered to strike. Less than an hour later, the hijacking was over. The personal ordeal for survivors and family members who had lost loved ones, however, was just beginning.

Some time after the storming of the plane, the U.S. military attaché in Greece was cleared to fly Scott to Malta. Capt. William Nordeen, the U.S. naval and defense attaché at the embassy, drove Scott in a sleek, black bulletproof limousine to the Athens airport, where the U.S. ambassador’s twelve-passenger jet was ready and waiting.

A former navy pilot who had just begun his assignment in Athens that August, Captain Nordeen, like Scott, was from Minnesota. Nordeen and the other crew member were like big brothers to Scott, as they helped calm his nerves with some small talk.

On the way to Malta, Scott rode up near the cockpit.

It was a dangerous mission. There was no time to submit a flight plan for approval, so the pilots risked colliding with scheduled air traffic. To lower the odds of a midair crash, they skimmed the ground — over the water, but under the radar — all the way to Malta.

There wasn’t a lot of talking during the flight. Most of the time, Scott sat quietly, wondering what he should be getting ready for. The details on my situation were still sketchy.

“I didn’t know if Jackie was alive or dead, whether she’d been shot in the face or had broken bones in her face. I didn’t know what to expect,” Scott said.

By the time Scott landed in Valletta late Monday morning, I was in surgery at St. Luke’s. Scott was cleared by Maltese authorities and assigned a local official to escort him to the hospital. By this time, the atmosphere at the airport had calmed down. It wasn’t a three-ring circus.

* * *

Officials from the U.S. embassy in Malta and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) later debriefed us on what happened during the hijacking and rescue effort.

Malta had refused to let the U.S counter-terrorist experts land at Luqa airport. Delta Force, the military’s crack antiterrorist commando team, never made it to Malta, either; three of its planes broke down on the way.

The hijackers had agreed to let medics pick up my body (they presumed I was dead) in exchange for food.

The final minutes of the drama unfolded while I was on my way to the hospital and in surgery. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak ordered twenty-five Egyptian commandos to storm the aircraft. The U.S.-trained team used grenades to blow a hole in the rear of the plane, where the hijackers put most of the Arab passengers, touching off a fierce gun battle. The spray of bullets struck one of the plane’s fuel tanks, causing it to explode. This sent a fireball blazing through the cabin, which was still filled with hostages.

While surgeons hovered over my body, doing their best to remove the bullet in my head and skull fragments from my brain, smoke and flames engulfed the runway in a dark, brooding cloud of human misery.

Fifty-eight people perished in the smoke and flames, including eight Palestinian children and their parents, and the hijacker who wore glasses. Everyone at the front of the plane, where I had been seated, died in the fire. The huge death toll made ours the deadliest hijacking and rescue in aviation history. The prevailing opinion was that the commandos used too much force in storming the plane. Not so many people needed to die.

Excerpted from Miles to Go Before I Sleep by Jackie Nink Pflug, with Peter J. Kisilos,  published by Hazelden Publishing, www.hazelden.org. Copyright  © 1996 by Hazelden Foundation. Used with permision. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission from the publisher. To learn more about the author, go to: www.jackiepflug.com.
 

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